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Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 37 STEFAN AQUILINA Meyerhold and The Revolution: A Reading through Henri Lefebvre’s Theories on “Everyday Life” VIVIAN APPLER “Shuffled Together under the Name of a Farce”: Finding Nature in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon KRISTI GOOD Kate Soffel’s Life of Crime: A Gendered Journey from Warden’s Wife to Criminal Actress PETER A. CAMPBELL Staging Ajax’s Suicide: A Historiography BRIAN E. G. COOK Rousing Experiences: Theatre, Politics, and Change MEGAN LEWIS Until You See the Whites...
Film and television create worlds, but they are also of a world, a world that is made up of stuff, to which humans attach meaning. Think of the last time you watched a movie: the chair you sat in, the snacks you ate, the people around you, maybe the beer or joint you consumed to help you unwind—all this stuff shaped your experience of media and its influence on you. The material culture around film and television changes how we make sense of their content, not to mention the very concepts of the mediums. Focusing on material cultures of film and television reception, The Stuff of Spectatorship argues that the things we share space with and consume as we consume television and film influence the meaning we gather from them. This book examines the roles that six different material cultures have played in film and television culture since the 1970s—including video marketing, branded merchandise, drugs and alcohol, and even gun violence—and shows how objects considered peripheral to film and television culture are in fact central to its past and future.
This collection of interviews offers unprecedented insight into the plays and creative works of Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as being an important commentary on contemporary theater and playwriting, from jazz and opera to politics and cultural memory. Suzan-Lori Parks in Person contains 18 interviews, some previously untranscribed or specially undertaken for this book, plus commentaries on her work by major directors and critics, including Liz Diamond, Richard Foreman, Bonnie Metzgar and Beth Schachter. These contributions combine to honor the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama, and explore her ideas about theater, history, race, and gender. Material from a wide...
This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s–1920s). This book focuses on physical culture – systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert – because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical cultur...
Stage properties are an often-ignored aspect of theatrical productions, in part because their usage is meant to be seamlessly integrated into the performance instead of a focal point for the audience. The contributors illuminate many aspects of this largely ignored yet crucial part of the theatre.
Film audiences have grown used to seeing female characters in "performance roles," singing or dancing on stages in nightclubs, musical arenas, or theaters--performing their "femaleness" for the fictional audience as well as the film viewing audience. But queer women in film perform on yet another level. In addition to performing their gender for the world, they also perform their sexuality for either a general or an "insider" audience, in ways that can be read to establish a queer visibility, to establish a sense of community, or to show romantic lesbian interest. This work examines "performance spaces" for lesbian identities in films, evaluating how queer femaleness is signified in contemporary cinema. It studies five films in particular: When Night Is Falling, Better Than Chocolate, Tipping the Velvet, Slaves to the Underground, and Prey for Rock and Roll. Through close textual analysis, evaluations of the conditions under which each film was produced and received, and dozens of audience surveys, it reveals much about both the story worlds of the films and the ways that queer women react to and feel about them.
Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, eds., Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter / Reviewed by Danny Devlin
This book examines contemporary English drama and its relation to the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British policy since 1979. The London stage has emerged as a key site in Britain’s reckoning with neoliberalism. On one hand, many playwrights have denounced the acquisitive values of unfettered global capitalism; on the other, plays have more readily revealed themselves as products of the very market economy they critique, their production histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London thus arrives at a usefully ambivalent political position, one that praises the political power of the theatre – its potential as a form of resistance to the neoliberal rationality that rides roughshod over democratic values – while simultaneously attending to the institutional bondage that constrains it. For, of course, the theatre itself everywhere straddles the line of capitulating to the marketization of our cultural life.
Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical work from China, Japan, India, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, England, the United States, Chile, Argentina, and Zimbabwe, addressing work from classical, popular, and contemporary theatre practices. The investigation of uses of food across media and artistic genres is a burgeoning area of scholarly investigation, yet regarding representation and symbolism, literature and film have received more att...
Author Barry B. Witham reclaims the work of Manny Fried, an essential American playwright so thoroughly blacklisted after he defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954, and again in 1964, that his work all but completely disappeared from the canon. Witham details Manny Fried’s work inside and outside the theatre and examines his three major labor plays and the political climate that both nurtured and disparaged their productions. Drawing on never-before-published interview materials, Witham reveals the details of how the United States government worked to ruin Fried’s career. From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting includes the complete text of Fried’s major labor plays, all...